American television personality, musician and journalist Lance Loud was BOTD in 1951. Born Alanson Loud in San Diego, California to a middle-class family, he was raised in Eugene, Oregon, before back to California with his family. As a teenager, he became obsessed with Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, writing fan letters to Warhol and establishing a sustained correspondence. In 1973, he and his family were featured in the TV documentary series An American Family, a 12-episode chronicle of their day-to-day lives, based on 300 hours of footage shot over seven months. The show became a ratings juggernaut, drawing 10 million viewers a week, shocking audiences with frank details of Mr Loud’s infidelities and resulting marital problems, and sparking national debates about the moral decline of the American nuclear family. 22 year-old Lance came out as gay during the series, making him one of the first openly gay people to appear on American television. He was shown moving to New York, wearing blue lipstick, and introducing his mother to transvestites and sex workers at the Chelsea Hotel. Ignoring requests by gay rights groups to parlay his celebrity into activism, he became a musician, forming rock band The Mumps in 1975. After the band’s failure, he returned to California in 1981 and studied journalism, becoming a freelance writer for Details, the Advocate and Interview magazines. Diagnosed with HIV in 1987, he lived with the disease and occasional bouts with Hepatitis C for over a decade. He died in 2001, aged 50. In 2003, the documentary A Death in the American Family was screened, based on 2001 interviews with Lance and his family, chronicling his AIDS diagnosis and 20-year struggle with crystal meth addiction. The TV film Cinema Verite, a fictionalised narrative about the making of An American Family, was broadcast in 2010, starring Thomas Dekker as Lance. His mother Pat published a memoir, Lance Out Loud, in 2012.